Those don't sound like power user features to me. For me, that would be something else, like beefing up Applescript support, or making sure sandboxing doesn't get in the way of application interoperability. Letting users add a way to let apps work together while still inside the sandbox that protects the system from attacks and conflicts. How about incremental backups in a pro version of Time Machine?

Control over the backup schedule would be nice. As it stands, the default is daily backup on a strict 24 hour schedule, with no adjustments possible without a third party add-on. Adding manual time machine scheduling would be a huge step forward.

To me, "power-user features" would be more like: "we're installing homebrew by default, and contributing a whole pile of formulas upstream". Porting features from a decidedly consumer-oriented OS like iOS seems unlikely to produce much power-usery goodness.

ewelch: Time Machine backups are incremental. Honestly if TM doesn't suit you there is always rsync or rsnapshot. A beefed up working iCloud would be great especially if they found a workaround to consistency issues in app database storage.

Spaces & finder updates are great. I hope an updated safari with a better debugger & inspector is coming because web devs won't be able to just use Chrome for development thanks to the upcoming WebKit fork.

I'm excited for the new version. A homebrew would be nice but I don't really care as it isn't exactly hard to get running.

Time Machine does do incremental backups. It only looks like the entire drive is backed up every hour due to extensive use of hard links to files that haven't changed since last backed up. But yes, Time Machine truly does copy only files that have actually changed.How Time Machine Works its Magic

Control over the backup schedule would be nice. As it stands, the default is daily backup on a strict 24 hour schedule, with no adjustments possible without a third party add-on. Adding manual time machine scheduling would be a huge step forward.

Not necessarily true about having to use a 3rd party solution. You can adjust it via terminal if you want. I believe the command is:

I'm not a power user myself per se, but I'm not sure porting features from a decidedly casual oriented OS would constitute as power user features.

Some of these moves worry me a little with Apple. I hope to be proven wrong, but I'm not totally convinced that what works best for iOS products means it will translate well to OSX, and while I enjoy the simplicity of iOS, I worry about OSX gradually being "dumbed down".

Man, this makes me feel really out of step... I'm still rocking Snow Leopard, which I absolutely adore. Each new version piques my interest, but I can never quite pull the trigger on an upgrade because for my workflow, SL is just about perfect. I might have to look into different OSX partitions one day.

Control over the backup schedule would be nice. As it stands, the default is daily backup on a strict 24 hour schedule, with no adjustments possible without a third party add-on. Adding manual time machine scheduling would be a huge step forward.

Not sure I follow you here. Time Machine makes hourly incremental backups by default.

These are NOT power features, just more crapware from iOS. Enough already Apple, Snow leopard was the last decent OS. How about letting us dump the stuff we don't use instead of claiming that apps like chess are vital to the OS and can't be deleted, without a trip to terminal?

isn't expected to significantly overhaul how the operating system functions, but will reportedly bring over more iOS features that could benefit OS X.

Yeah, I think we've got different ideas of what "power user" means.

Quote:

and the ability to keep different Spaces open on separate monitors

I assume you mean the ability to use Apple's Fullscreen implementation on multiple monitors? Because Spaces has worked fine with multiple screens right from the start. A more power user thing would be to bring back some of the power Spaces had back before it got integrated into MC, including the ability to have a grid of spaces rather then just a horizontal bar.

What, no genome sequencing, no astronomical surveying, no adjustable Time Machine schedules? Hardly "power user" ! MAC will never gain marketshare in the enterprise until I have to do basic tasks with hexadecimal codes entered via serial console. Get with it, Apple!

The App Switcher is one of the more poorly thought out components to iOS. It shows all apps you have run, in order of when last run, even if they are not currently running. Unsurprisingly, a very large number of iOS users think all those apps down there are in fact running and waste a lot of time "closing" them all, thinking they are freeing up memory and saving battery life by doing so. CMD-TAB works perfectly fine as it is in OS X and modifying it to work like the iOS app switcher (or worse... burdening the OS more by having an iOS-like App Switcher as yet another method of switching apps) will be very irritating for a lot of people and confusing for still more. If anything, they need to bring the existing functionality of OS X's app switcher over to iOS.

I wish they'd include the option to set what monitor you want the desktop on, and the ability to turn off the internal display on macbooks. I really like this in Windows 7, and I'd like to have that on OS X.

Let's hope Core Audio and the AU spec are being taken a look at. The AU spec needs a serious overhaul and Logic needs to implement it FULLY this time. The graphical core will probably get updated with newer opengl extensions, hopefully Apple can also address the speed of their drivers, they are a little slow. OSX's SMB implementation is dismally slow, what takes seconds to copy in Windows, takes minutes in OSX. I think they should have stuck with Samba, but at this point maybe they should think about striking a deal with Microsoft. That's something power users in a mixed environment would enjoy. Spaces on multiple monitors should have been there already but its nice to see that it will make it in the next version.

Either way unless some application really needs the latest OS, I think I'll just wait this time around. I upgraded to 10.8 last year and was seriously burned by a huge bug in Logic, that pretty much made the application useless.

This though I don't understand. 10.8 is much better then 10.6 or 10.7.

For me it's just a matter of having a set up that functions fine for my work flow and not wanting to rock the boat. It's not a knock against any other version on my end, in fact as I stated I do get genuinely interested in what new features have been coming out and might explore the possibility of setting up a new OSX partition. But 10.6's Expose, Spaces, etc all work exactly in tune with how I work, so my desire to upgrade is minimal.

I wish they'd include the option to set what monitor you want the desktop on, and the ability to turn off the internal display on macbooks. I really like this in Windows 7, and I'd like to have that on OS X.

Clamshell mode does this already. You will need an external source of input - however, this can simply be an iPhone with Logitech's iTouch mouse and server on it, and it works fine.

This though I don't understand. 10.8 is much better then 10.6 or 10.7.

I concur. Although I personally came to prefer 10.7 over 10.6, there were a number of awkward changes that a lot of people understandably didn't like. 10.8 smoothed out pretty much all of that and stands out to me as easily being the best version of OS X to date.

I think people are misinterpreting this. If you look at most other iOS features brought over to OS X, they were either adopted properly for the desktop or made entirely optional. I expect no less of this. Think of it this way: it will allow you, if you so desire, to toggle on "single app mode" to save power on your macbook.

Here's another funny thing: single app mode was actually a feature in the original Mac OS X Developer Previews (pre 10.0). It existed as a purple traffic light sitting in the current position of the fullscreen button, and when toggled on only a single application would show at a time (what we know today as "iOS style").

The rest is quite welcome, I look forward to see Apple's implementation of Finder tabs.

As for 10.6 vs. 10.7 or 10.8, the UI theme is enough for me to upgrade. It's so much nicer and more refined compared to the overly dark greys and garish colors of 10.6 aqua. Popovers have been nice, too; they actually work pretty nicely as desktop UI elements.

Time Machine does incremental backups. Unless you mean something different.

Time machine does not do block level updates - the whole file has to be backup again even if only one byte in the file changed. It seems that a new file system is necessary to add block updating in Time Machine.

Control over the backup schedule would be nice. As it stands, the default is daily backup on a strict 24 hour schedule, with no adjustments possible without a third party add-on. Adding manual time machine scheduling would be a huge step forward.

I would like to see better control in Time Machine over what gets deleted when. Right now, it deletes oldest files first when the partition is full. How about a setting that is something like "Delete all OS files older than one month before deleting any user files".

Basically, in my mind there's a hierarchy regarding which old versions I might be likely to want to restore. Low on the list are OS files (after I've been using an update long enough to know it's OK). For both iOS Apps and Podcasts, I like having full backups of the current ones on my system, but once I delete an App or a Podcast, I know I'm not going to want to restore from Time Machine, so it may as well either not save deleted versions at all, or have those be the first files deleted when it needs more room.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I believe right now Time Machine deletes whole slices at a time when it runs out of space, not individual files. You can, however, go into Time Machine and delete all versions of a file/folder older than the one you've highlighted (inclusively). I do occasionally go into Time Machine and delete all older versions of the Podcasts folder, for example.

My wife is constantly frustrated by the 'coupled' space when she does work on dual displays. If there was an option to de-couple the desktops, she'd be a happy camper. I hope that's one of the options in the new version.

This though I don't understand. 10.8 is much better then 10.6 or 10.7.

I generally agree. I really like a lot of the features in 10.7 and 10.8. It took me a long time to move from 10.6 and there will be those who do not move until they buy new hardware that will not run 10.6.

For some functionality the sandboxing in 10.8 is a little extreme. Apple needs to work on the sandboxing APIs so that developers can continue to innovate and I think they will open more API functionality while maintaining the sandbox as time goes forward.

Any preview on which models will be dropped in this version? I'm close to buying a refurb machine (Macbook) for my daughter. Of course, I'm expecting my mid-2009 Mac Mini might be obsolete too, as it is the last pre-Unibody mini. Unibody minis replaced the 9400 video with a 320M chip.